Anyway, back to our literary part of the general discussion. Charon's gone, World War II is over, The Great War is now called World War I and the Fifth Great Maelstrom is raging harder than anything we've ever seen before. Pretty picture, huh? And you wonder why the Gaunts all chuckle when they hear that the Baby Boom was going on at that time. We'd had two booms, they weren't babies, and boy could they kick up a fuss and scream. The Spectre problem got real bad at that time.
They were erupting everywhere, and there wasn't a day that went
by that the Legions weren't routing them out of their territories.
But, of course, this might be Maelstrom but the old problems
are still there - the Grim hate the Skeletal hate the Iron hate
the Silent and no one's crazy about the But, after a while the Spectres got so bad
that the Legions were actually considering banding some of their
units into cooperative groups just to deal with the problem.
It takes a special breed of Wraith to suit up and go out to actually
hunt for Spectres, though, so they started recruiting Legionnaires
for a special order. Each man got one whole Anyway, back to the Skinlands: after the shooting
was over a lot of the personnel assigned to the Air Force base
came back to civilian life, and decided to stay in Las Vegas.
That base was deactivated in 1947. The BMI plant was closed down
before then, but they reactivated it in 1947 with a bunch of
peacetime purposes in mind. That brought a But we're talking crime and punishment, aren't we? The Golden Nugget opened up in 1946. And, on December 26th, 1946, The Flamingo opened its doors to a giant pink neon sign, pink flamingos in the lawn, and a very shitty reception which all but closed the doors on Bugsy Siegel's life. Remember all that jawing I did about the Mob?
Well, in 1943 Siegel was sent out here by Meyer Lansky and Frank
Costello - no relation to Lou, I hope, or was it Bud? - to start
putting some money down and getting the real show on the road.
None of this running numbers shit, anymore. Lansky wanted to
see some huge dollar signs dancing in He had Lansky and Costello's Havana money, and he came up with a great idea to spend it - he'd build a casino with a touch of class, as opposed to the dives they had before then. It would be what he'd called "a carpet joint," based on the resort hotels of Miami: a place to gamble in a plush, borderline-snooty setting with pretty dancing girls, prettier cocktail waitresses, plenty of good food, and big-name entertainment. And that was The Flamingo: the first world-class Vegas resort the Mafia ever built from the ground up. But, come December 26, it was a fiasco. It rained like a sonofabitch, which ruined opening night, and seemed to cause a whole run of bad luck for Bugsy. The guys back home were getting antsy for some payback and he couldn't give it up because he couldn't get it. Come to find out his girlfriend, Virginia Hill had apparently learned something from Lansky - how to skim money off the top. But she wasn't as good at it, and after she'd been been tucking away money meant for construction for too long it couldn't escape the East Coast's notice. Finally, they'd had enough, and one June night in 1947 some of Bugsy's friends came to call at Virgina's place in Beverly Hills. I heard that one of his eyes did a nice, graceful arc all the way across the living room after they pumped five bullets into him. Can't beat a .30-.30 carbine for that kind of work. They didn't do anything to Virginia, but they did tell her to get stuffed and consider her room at The Flamingo a lost cause. After that, the New York contingent closed in on the hotel and picked up from where Bugsy had left it, and the bad luck streak seemed to end there. Money started rolling in and the high-rollers all started coming in to enjoy the party. Pity Bugsy didn't live to see his dream become a reality, but you know, that's fate. You make your life punching other people's clocks and then one day your own's gonna get punched: it's that simple. 1949 came around, and about a half a mile
up the way from The Flamingo was seeing some new development.
One of the Havana connections by the name of Wilbur Clark decided
he wanted a piece of the action in Las Vegas, too, and started
working on something called the Desert Inn. Things were pretty
lousy for him. He kept having these On the more martial side of things, the Las
Vegas Army Air Field reopened as a fighter pilot school in 1949.
They renamed it "Nellis" after some guy who got aced
in the War. And then in '51, about sixty-five miles Northwest
of here, they started lighting up atomic bombs in the Nevada
Test Site out in the desert. There were about forty-five You ever have to "duck and cover?" No? Okay, that was after my time and before yours, then. From our perspective on this side, however, we were shit scared. Every time they light one of those firecrackers the nihils would all open wide and start sending Spectres out to play, so The Ten really came into their own after that time. The good news was we got a lot of business at the forges, with all the Spectres they were catching. The bad news was that there were a lot more who did their damage and then disappeared before they could be caught. If there was one thing that made up for it, the Quick population had increased by a huge leap and a bound. In 1940 it was around 8,500? Come 1950 it was at... drum roll please... 24,624, give or take a dead messenger in a shallow grave. Back |